Tag Archives: illusion of security

Our “Security State” is a lie. We have traded our freedom from unreasonable search of our person and property for only the illusion of security. We have traded our dignity and privacy, subjected ourselves to be groped, probed, wire tapped, and spied upon for what?

Our Security State has one job and that is to protect us. It does it badly. Despite all the claims of plots it’s foiled, it offers no actual evidence. What it does and does, if not well, at least obsessively, is to collect dots. It now has a great pile of dots, so many, in fact, that it can’t begin to connect them—until after something bad happens.

Post facto, Aaron Alexis was clearly a bomb with an already lit fuse. The information was all there: Two gun incidents on the record. Anger impulse control issues, also on the record. Complaints to the police by him that he was hearing voices and being influenced by microwaves and a call from the police to the Navy!!! Were there any more dots he’d be a Georges Seurat painting not a Rorschach.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “Underwear Bomber,” also left a trail of dots that literally couldn’t be missed. They were so uncomplicated that it shouldn’t have taken anyone in intelligence to stop him, only someone with intelligence. If his travels in Jihadi land weren’t enough, then try this out: His father, a former Minister of Economic Development in Nigeria and one of the richest men in Nigeria, someone with bona fides and to be taken seriously, reported to two CIA agents in Nigeria and also directly to the American Embassy in Yemen that his son had “extreme religious ideas.” This resulted in exactly nothing. Umar wasn’t added to the then 500,000 names on our terrorist watch list or the 40,000 names on the no fly list.

The Tzarnaev brothers, of Boston Marathon Bombing infamy, scattered plenty of dots on their way to terror. Timberlan traveled back and forth to various Jihadi rich countries. Our friends in Russia contacted us about his problematic ties in Russian territories. After the fact, we listened to some of their phone conversations and went over their Internet communications—that we’d had all the time, that were in our possession before their attack. To what end?

Meanwhile, we have mass shooting events and no one believes we’ll do anything to meaningfully restrict guns from the hands of unstable people. Gun violence kills 30,000 a year in America. Religious/politically motivated terrorism kills how many? The Boston Bombing, that should have been stopped, killed 3 and injured 264. Nidal Hassan, killer of 13 innocent people, also left lots of dots before his terror attack. No one did anything.